Assuming it's 6 months or 1 year, what sort of durations of stay are granted? Currently, we're plotting 2 weeks, but could consider going for 3. If we come in with a return ticket 3 weeks out, it would truly suck if she were only allowed to stay in for 2 weeks.

We stayed one month. One thing puzzled me, namely complete lack of immigration processing leaving LAX on the way back to China. We just hopped on AA183 leaving from Terminal 4.

Got her passport back with a shiny new visa. For some reason, it's good for 361 days.

The other days will be the days that they spent putting the visa into the passport. I noticed the same thing when I got my z visa a couple of years ago. It was valid for 3 months but the 3 month period started the day I had submitted the application not the day I could actually go and pick it up with the visa - so I effectively lost 4-5 days.

Logged

Sometimes it seems things go by too quickly. We are so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take the time to enjoy where we are. (Calvin and Hobbs)

Well that was fun. A side-trip to California on the way out SAVED me some money on the tickets. Guess I should have studied 12 dimensional transcendental aircraft economics calculations in college to figure out how that happened. Paying was a royal pain. For some reason, it kept erroring on PayPal (worked fine the last few times I used to on the airline's site and there's plenty of money in the linked bank account) and then took 5 tries to convince it to accept a credit card (had to warn my ex about the bill heading her way ).

Turns out we're not going through Japan, so that's one less complication. All the international connections are HK-US, but there's a LOT of flights inside the USA.

Well, as I promised back in July I am here to update this thread. My girlfriend and I applied for her UK Tourist Visa in early October and a couple of weeks later it was approved Very swift and efficient process and all of the Visa staff along the way have been incredibly helpful. I want to thank everybody for their help and comments